Asus Crosshair VIII Hero PCIe

[Steev43230]

Question: Does anyone know - will the Asus Crosshair VIII Hero have a PCIe slot that is x4-x4-x4-x4 so that I can use a card like this one or this one and set it up in a RAID 6 array?

 

Gratuitous Comments Not Really Questions:

• I'm trying to get learned up really quickly here and so if my question doesn't make sense, if you could blur your eyes a little maybe you'll grok what I'm trying to ask.
• Also I understand I need/want to use m.2 memory with "connector M" (as opposed to connector B), so I hope the ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro PCIe Gen3x4 M.2 2280 SSDs I just bought from Drop without checking first are the right ones.

Update: It has connector (key) type M.

[schwellmo92]

You need a x16 slot for those cards, you will need to go HEDT platform. Otherwise if you got a X570 you could maybe split your graphics card lanes and run the graphics card at x8 and the NVMe card at x8 (because it'll run PCI-E 4.0 so bandwidth shouldn't be a problem).

[Windows7ge]

I'm not sure about it's support for PCI_e bifurcation. That's generally a server only feature those it does seem the LGA2011-3/2066 socket motherboards may support it.

 

Your choice for RAID6 makes absolutely no sense with 4 drives. Do RAID10. You'll have much better performance with the same usable capacity.

[Guest]

Let me check.

[Steev43230]

17 minutes ago, schwellmo92 said:

You need a x16 slot for those cards, you will need to go HEDT platform....

My desired mobo has three x16 slots. But I'm not sure what is meant by

PCIe    2 x16: x16, x8/x8
        1 x16: x4

I think "1 x16: x4" means that one of the 16 lane slots is split-able into four, er, highways, of four lanes each, but I'm not sure.

 

I have had zero faith in tech companies' ability to write clearly ever since I was reading Tandy's BASIC manual for our TRS-80 and attempting to carefully follow their example of function(string) - WHICH IS NOT THE SAME AS function("string"). Ahem... um... er.... Ahem. Sorry.

Edited June 16, 2019 by Steev43230

[Guest]

Nope. Don't see any of the menus I see on my Zenith. Didn't think it would.

[Steev43230]

8 minutes ago, Windows7ge said:

I'm not sure about it's support for PCI_e bifurcation. That's generally a server only feature those it does seem the LGA2011-3/2066 socket motherboards may support it.

 

Your choice for RAID6 makes absolutely no sense with 4 drives. Do RAID10. You'll have much better performance with the same usable capacity.

Thanks for the first comment; something I will need to check. For the other, I understand that RAID 6 (I may have meant 6-0) allows loss of two drives.

[Guest]

I read that wrong. My brain saw VII.

[Windows7ge]

6 minutes ago, Steev43230 said:

Thanks for the first comment; something I will need to check. For the other, I understand that RAID 6 (I may have meant 6-0) allows loss of two drives.

With 4 drives you may as well use RAID10. RAID10 will allow for the loss of 2 drives while at the software level offer much better performance since it won't have to calculate for parity writes. Same useable space, more performance, there's no reason to use RAID6 here.

[Steev43230]

11 minutes ago, Windows7ge said:

* * * RAID10 will allow for the loss of 2 drives while at the software level offer much better performance....

So spiceworks pointed me to https://smbitjournal.com/2012/11/choosing-a-raid-level-by-drive-count/ - very useful.

 

And . . . I now recall that my whole Raid 6-0 idea was just for a cheap 16-disc USB array for play time with my Pi, and I got myself all mixed up.

[Fasauceome]

29 minutes ago, Steev43230 said:

I think "1 x16: x4" means that one of the 16 lane slots is split-able into four, er, highways, of four lanes each, but I'm not sure

It means it's 16 physically, so graphics card size, but 4 electrically, so it works the same as a small one.

[Steev43230]

2 minutes ago, fasauceome said:

It means it's 16 physically, so graphics card size, but 4 electrically, so it works the same as a small one.

So it's bifurcated?

[Steev43230]

22 minutes ago, Windows7ge said:

With 4 drives you may as well use RAID10. RAID10 will allow for the loss of 2 drives while at the software level offer much better performance since it won't have to calculate for parity writes. Same useable space, more performance, there's no reason to use RAID6 here.

I can't find anything online that says RAID 10 allows loss of more then one drive. Help me out here?

[Windows7ge]

Pulled this from ASUS's website:

Quote

 2 x PCIe 4.0 x16 Safeslots (x16, x8/x8) [CPU]
 1 x PCIe 4.0 x16 slot (x4)
 1 x PCIe 4.0 x1 slot

It's just telling you you can run 2 GPUs both @ x8, that the bottom most slot is really just x4, and that you have an x1 slot. I haven't looked in the manual yet but nothing is showing bifurcation support. Quite frankly I doubt the manual will tell you either. There was also a reddit post with someone complaining about a lack of AMD giving bifurcation support so I think you're out of luck.

[Windows7ge]

13 minutes ago, Steev43230 said:

I can't find anything online that says RAID 10 allows loss of more then one drive. Help me out here?

How many drives you can lose depends on how many drives you have. With 4 drives the data will be striped across two then mirrored across the other two so unless you were to lose the drives containing both copies of the same data chunks you can rebuild it.

[Fasauceome]

20 minutes ago, Steev43230 said:

So it's bifurcated?

It isn't, it's just a large plastic slot with the wiring for 4 lanes. The topmost X16 slot has all the wires, the X16 as X4 slot has less wires but is the same size

[Steev43230]

31 minutes ago, Windows7ge said:

* * * There was also a reddit post with someone complaining about a lack of AMD giving bifurcation support so I think you're out of luck.

Well crap.

[Steev43230]

23 minutes ago, fasauceome said:

It isn't, it's just a large plastic slot with the wiring for 4 lanes....

Well crap

[Windows7ge]

2 minutes ago, Steev43230 said:

Well crap.

I guess the question here now is why would you want to? Single M.2 drives a hitting and even going beyond 4GB/s. Why would you want to RAID 4 of them?

[Windows7ge]

1 minute ago, Steev43230 said:

Well crap

Find a pic of the back of the motherboard. You'll see how little of the slot is actually soldered into the traces.

[Steev43230]

5 minutes ago, Windows7ge said:

I guess the question here now is why would you want to? Single M.2 drives a hitting and even going beyond 4GB/s. Why would you want to RAID 4 of them?

Because I want this (except for the Threadripper part. I'll be getting a 12core Ryzen 9):